Adventures in Guangzhou!

Ma, ma, ma, ma.
Ba, ba, ba, ba.
Ta, ta, ta, ta.
Na, na, na, na.
You get the idea. It was nice to finally start official instruction and I am definitely looking forward to studying. I think I'm starting just in time to circumvent any boredom and feed my brain at the same time. It's perfect! On the flipside, it's also incredibly intimidating to start a new language that is so foreign to English. I'm trying to convince my psyche that having studied a non-romance language such as Hebrew will help. Plus I do have a relatively decent ear to hear the differences in tones so that's a plus. At least I hope I do. I'm marking the day on my calendar: September 20th. I'm wondering how long it will be before I can actually participate in conversation at the faculty lunch tables. I'm shooting for October 20th to at least be able to explain to them that I'm making progress. Wish me luck.

On the teaching front, I finally started my history class which I am very excited about. I mentioned before that they gave me complete freedom to design a course so I'm teaching 20th c. American history through music. What a treat! They asked me how many students I wanted in the class and I told them that ideally it should be capped at 20. The head of the department sort of scoffed at that figure so I upped it to 30. He asked me if 40 was okay and of course I agreed. I guess I forgot that there are almost 700 kids in the Senior 2 class and that I'm here to spend as much time as possible with them. So apparently each individual section was allowed 4 students and competition was hot for each slot. I'd like to think that everyone was so interested in the topic and dying to learn U.S. history but in reality I think the novelty of the foreign teacher hasn't worn off yet. I'm not THAT naive. Either way, I was expecting at least a somewhat eager crowd.

As it happens, today was the big schoolwide jump-roping contest that coincided with my class, so half of them were absent. Great. I thought it was a bit funny to see high school boys practicing jump rope over the past few weeks but apparently they were in training. Interesting. The ones who did make it to class were definitely interested so I was excited about that. After I went over the syllabus, I lectured briefly about America at the turn of the century and then went right into the advent of jazz, as taught through a few recordings I have of Jelly Roll Morton. I had them compare the recordings to some Bach I played and they came up with some good observations. It was an encouraging beginning and while the course will be a lot of work for me, I'm totally psyched about it.

After class I had an interesting interaction with one of the students. One of the girls in the back came up to me and asked if we could avoid studying any additional jazz (this, after I assigned a homework reading about the proliferation of jazz in New Orleans). I was caught a bit off guard and asked her to clarify the question. She was a bit shy, but she managed to explain that she didn't understand jazz and that it made her feel uncomfortable. When I asked her why, she responded that she didn't like the lack of structure. Wow. I could be reading into that too much but it seems like a reflection of traditional Chinese society and the communist way. Regardless, I explained that I was of the opinion that understanding jazz was crucial to understanding America in the first half of the century and that we would be doing another two weeks on various forms of jazz. I hope I was not too rash in disregarding her complaint, but I think she needs to adapt. I guess one of the luxuries of being a teacher is that I have the final say.

On a completely different note, I had a really strange experience walking to the gym today after classes. After I finish teaching I generally head back to my apartment, drop off my stuff, change, and go right to the basketball court or football field. As I was walking over today (a 45 second walk) my ears perked up to the PA system. Let me explain- the school has a very loud public address system that they use for the bells signifying the start/end of class (think of the bells from the movie "Grease"). They also use it for announcements and to play music at the end of the midday break in order to give students time to wake up from naps and get back to the classroom buildings. Sidenote- whether intentional or not, this music is generally a very somber tune and suggests a mood of stop-having-fun-and-start-learning-immediately. There have been other seemingly random times when they play various other songs through the system but it's always in Chinese and I subconsciously tune it out. Today, however, was different. I heard the beginning of a song that sounded familiar. I started humming along with the intro to the song but couldn't place it. Finally the verse kicked in- "My Father's Eyes" by Eric Clapton. How random!?

On the sports front, I found out that I am now officially #18 on the football (a.k.a. soccer) team. The new uniforms are pretty snazzy and I feel proud to represent the school. Apparently we're sponsored by Umbro, or rather a reasonable facsimile thereof. I think we have our next game Wednesday but who knows. I think I'll just keep the uni with me at all times in case. Other than that, nothing else to report beyond missing baseball...